


They Will Bind You With Love That Is Graceful and Green as a Stem

by Minutia_R



Category: The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Bittersweet, F/M, Immortal Problems, Open Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-08
Updated: 2014-09-08
Packaged: 2018-02-16 15:48:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2275524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minutia_R/pseuds/Minutia_R
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Calypso has seen Sally Jackson’s window-box garden blooming at night against the brilliant skyline of Manhattan; she’s sung songs at the campfire at Camp Half-Blood and drunk chocolate in the coffeehouses of New Rome; she’s camped with the Hunters of Artemis beneath arctic skies, watching her sister Zoe stalk the Great Bear among the Northern Lights.  But she doesn’t feel the need to do any of it more than once.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	They Will Bind You With Love That Is Graceful and Green as a Stem

Ogygia is now an island off the coast of Florida. Leo had spread his maps in front of Calypso and explained the current shape of the world, and she had pointed to the peninsula that formed one coast of the Sea of Monsters, giving it a natural geomagical resonance that would make it perfect for an anchor point. He’d told her its name, and said it was a lucky one. _Florida_ : full of flowers. The tricky part was getting the spell just right, fixing it firmly enough in place that Calypso can always find her way back when she leaves, without letting in mortals with their land developers and their tax authorities.

She asked Leo to stay, but he left in the end. That was the bitterest part, finding herself repeating the old dance again, like a prisoner released into the wide world who finds himself pacing the dimensions of his cell over and over, turn and about.

He tried, Calypso will give him that much. He really did. But even without a prophecy driving him onward to save the world, he’d missed the noise and the smell and the soot of cities, and the wide-open blue of the skies. He’d missed his own forges and his friends, and his solitude too, which was hard to come by living in close quarters on such a small island. So he’d left, and he’d asked her, once again, to come along.

But Ogygia is Calypso’s home, and she doesn’t want to live anywhere else. She’s traveled since she won her freedom--she’s seen Sally Jackson’s window-box garden blooming at night against the brilliant skyline of Manhattan; she’s sung songs at the campfire at Camp Half-Blood and drunk chocolate in the coffeehouses of New Rome; she’s camped with the Hunters of Artemis beneath arctic skies, watching her sister Zoe stalk the Great Bear among the Northern Lights. But she doesn’t feel the need to do any of it more than once. The habits of millennia are hard to break. As time passes, she leaves Ogygia less and less. She hasn’t even been to the mainland for the Epcot International Flower & Garden Festival for years.

It’s enough to know that she can leave, and that her friends can come see her. Leo is a frequent visitor, and he’s always welcome--unless he happens to find her with her hand under the elbow of a convalescent hero, gently encouraging him--or her--to take their first steps after an injury that left them nearly dead. Then he knows enough to go quietly away again, and come back at a better time.

Calypso had always thought that the gods sent her exactly the sort of hero that she couldn’t help but love. Then they’d sent her Leo, and she’d had to reconsider--and since rejoining the world she’s found that her tastes are more catholic than either she or the gods had ever thought possible. Heroes of all sorts, battered by quests in the Sea of Monsters, wash up on her shore now. Men and women, young and old, brave, foolhardy, honorable, greedy . . . some of them barely stand still long enough for her bandage up their cuts before they plunge back into the surf. Others stay longer to complete their recovery, for company and food and rest. And there are some . . . who will accept everything she has to give.

She loves them all, each as much as they will let her. She’s sad whenever they leave. But she doesn’t ask them to stay, not anymore.

Leo isn’t jealous, he assures her. How can he be? Gods are like that. If gods weren’t like that, he would never have been born.

Calypso, annoyed, reminds him that she isn’t a goddess. An immortal, a daughter of Titans--but not a goddess. He just laughs.

You are to me, he says.

He’s growing older. Once, his measurements on her loom changed with every visit--broader shoulders, greater height, though he’s never lost the awkward gangliness of his limbs. He was delighted the first time he visited and found himself taller than she was. His shape has steadied out, but there are always new scars on his hands and arms, and soon there will be wrinkles where there never were, gray hairs or no hair. He’s always changing. She never does.

One day he’ll leave, and not come back. And on that day--though Calypso doesn’t like to admit it--she doubts she’ll go looking for him.

**Author's Note:**

> The title of the story is from Leonard Cohen's "Sisters of Mercy."


End file.
